Review of sustainability assessments in city logistics from holistic perspective: critical insights, gaps, and future directions

Abstract

The existing reviews of sustainability assessments in city logistics are limited in terms of research applications and assessment methods being considered. Comprehensive review from holistic perspective is crucial and missing. This research aimed to offer comprehensive and critical research insight, identify gaps, and propose future directions by analyzing and synthesizing the complete research spectrum of city logistics sustainability assessment. Systematic literature review with iterative approach was applied and 299 articles from Scopus and Web of Science databases were selected and reviewed through content analysis. Results revealed that “transport” and “collaboration” were the most addressed research themes whereas “infrastructure” was the least investigated. Regarding the method practices, findings indicated the prevalence of “indicator system” method group in almost all research themes, except “transport” and “planning” in which “performance evaluation model” and “multi-criteria decision-making” method groups were preferred. As for sustainability coverage, “abiotic”, “resource”, “cost”, and “society” related aspects of sustainability were commonly addressed among studies whereas “biotic”, “earning”, and “city” related aspects were often neglected. In terms of indicator selection, results pointed out the heterogeneity and lack of consensus among studies under current research practices. Through in-depth review analysis, this study proposed comprehensive indicator framework for researchers to provide guidance on future indicator selection processes, offered critical literature insight into existing city logistics sustainability initiatives and their effects on city logistics sustainability for policy makers to consider trade-offs among various initiatives for better decision-making processes, and identified gaps and the way forwards to assist researchers for further advancing the research domain.